BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith wrote an extensive appreciation of “What It Takes” in 2010, when he was a reporter for Politico. He praised Cramer’s ambition for understanding politicians as human beings, a trait Smith said steamed other reporters.

The book included a specific indictment of the press’ focus on Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, as Cramer wrote that pathetic “Karacter Kops” confused trivial matters of sexual morality with the actual, non-reductive thing called character, which he was writing about.

When he was invited to speak at the National Press Club in 1992, it was as a media critic. “Drop the mechanical notion of objectivity,” he urged, suggesting that reporters substitute “fairness — a harder standard to maintain.”

When I finally did force my way into a few of the offices of these important Washington figures and I started asking about the candidates, I found that they really didn’t know these guys. They knew them in a kind of Washington way. They’d been in a couple of meetings with them or they’d been at a dinner party where this guy was the speaker or they had seen them on the floor of the House or Senate a few times, but they didn’t know what made the guy tick. They didn’t know why he was in politics. They didn’t know what was driving him onward or what was the real reason that he was climbing to the top of the pyramid.

“He liked Joe Biden and Bob Dole and both Bushes,” Seidel told Schwirz. “He did not feel compromised by allowing himself to get close to them. He did not see himself in a confrontational reportorial role — he was telling a story.”

We came to visit Chestertown when political reporting, always mostly a business of ephemera, had reached its most fleeting. Tweets and blog items aren’t built to last; they’re instruments for conveying the message of a moment. Most news articles were just as ephemeral, but it has become harder to pretend. But Richard never had any interest in the modest new ambitions of the contemporary media.